Ron Howard's 'Journey' from Opie to Filmmaker Hits 50 Years

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BEVERLY HILLS — It's Ron Howard's 50th anniversary in show business — and a whole nother half-century may have to pass before he makes that movie about the time-traveling talking pie.
That's the extraordinarily bad idea that Howard, playing a shady version of himself in a 1998 episode of The Simpsons, stole from Homer and sold to Hollywood for two big sacks of money.

Reminded of the talking-pie premise a decade later, the Oscar-winning filmmaker rubs the back of his neck and jokes: "Oh man, that's on the back burner but still on slow boil." Then he adds that doing The Simpsons "was an honor. Probably, from my kids' perspective, my coolest turn."


Before becoming one of Hollywood's top directors, uncoolness was how he made his name as aw-shucks Opie on The Andy Griffith Show and clean-cut Richie Cunningham on Happy Days.


The movies he created when he got behind the camera were as varied as they were successful: Splash, Willow, Backdraft, Apollo 13, Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas and A Beautiful Mind, which won Academy Awards for director and picture.

His latest film, Frost/Nixon (expanding nationwide this weekend) stars Michael Sheen and Frank Langella in the story of British journalist David Frost's famous 1977 verbal duel with President Nixon.

The film is a likely Oscar front-runner; some critics are comparing it not just to All the President's Men but also Rocky.

"I think the majority of people who go to see the film sort of expect to appreciate it, but they don't have any idea they'll be that gratified with it as entertainment, too," Howard says. "I hope some people feel that it is an action movie, a suspense thriller, but we have words and close-ups instead of bombs and bullet hits."

Meanwhile, the filmmaker is finishing work on Angels & Demons, a prequel to his adaptation of the best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, again starring Tom Hanks as academic Robert Langdon. (It opens May 15.)

Sitting at a well-worn wooden table in his office at Imagine Entertainment, the company he founded with longtime producing partner Brian Grazer, Howard, 54, has a thick red beard and is without his usual baseball cap as he talks five decades of work.

He repeatedly refers to his films as "journeys." "Those journeys are my life's adventure, going from project to project, with each individual set of personalities. It's always it's own new kind of expedition."

It all began in 1959

Appropriately then, his first acting role was a 1959 war film called The Journey. The movie was a drama about the Hungarian uprising against Soviet forces and a family of Americans trapped in the siege. Howard's father, character actor Rance Howard, had a bit part as a soldier, and someone was needed to play the Americans' young son.

"It was going to be filmed in Vienna, and if I did it, that meant we'd all get to go to Europe. They were starving actors and probably thought this was their only chance to get their little boy Ronny any culture whatsoever," Howard says.

"They thought this was a one-off, and they'd take the money and buy government bonds with it or something and put it in the college fund. But I loved it. I remember how cool it was. They had tanks, and I remember literally climbing on the gun barrel."

It was also the first movie role for Jason Robards, who would later play Steve Martin's father in Howard's Parenthood.

Another co-star in the film was Yul Brynner, as a Soviet colonel. Howard, who had just turned 4, recalls "a scene where he was supposed to take a shot of vodka and then bite the glass. He probably felt as a safety issue he needed to show me it was sugar glass. So he showed it to me, let me lick it and taste the sugar and gave me a little lecture about how, of course, you would never bite glass."

Howard recalls being fascinated by the hustle and bustle of the movie set and says he was eager to keep acting. He was 6 when The Andy GriffithShow began, and the image of Howard carrying fishing poles with his TV father over the whistled theme song made him a pop-culture icon at an age when most kids were just starting school.

"I learned cursive writing to sign autographs. Early on, I remember people having to sort of patiently sit there tapping their toes as I wrote out R — O — N. It took forever."

When he wasn't working, Howard would go back to public school, but his popularity as Opie didn't transfer. "It doesn't necessarily lead to popularity among kids, among your peers," he says. "Later on, if you're the cool guy in the band or in the TV show and you can get girls … that's a much different thing than being in the fourth or fifth grade. Every time I would come back, even though I knew these guys, I'd have to have a few fights. You have to re-establish yourself."

Sports were important to proving to his classmates he could be a friend and teammate, not just the odd celebrity boy. "I never much liked it. Then it's really tough as you go through adolescence, because the industry stops hiring you. Not only are you gawky, but legally they can't work you as many hours. So if they can hire someone who's 18 who can play 16, they don't need pimply you at 16."

The Andy Griffith Show ended in 1968, when Howard was 14. He also was in 1962's The Music Man and had steady work in other TV shows and Disney movies. In 1973, still credited as Ronny Howard, he got his first grown-up role in newcomer George Lucas' American Graffiti.

Later, when he was deep into his 1974-84 run on the sitcom Happy Days, Howard became friends with the Star Wars creator. "I had this tough, brutalizing, humiliating renegotiation with Paramount and ABC on Happy Days, and it was my first dose of the industry really trying to impose its will. I remember calling George, because when American Graffiti turned out to be hit, he took one of his 11 points on the film and divided it 10 ways and just gave it to the actors, so we all had one-tenth of 1% of AmericanGraffiti. It would add up to quite a lot of money in 1973.

"I realized I never properly thanked him. I never even thanked him at all. It was just the hubris of youth. So I called him up in the wake of this really brutal negotiation and said: 'You are 180 degrees from what I just experienced, and I realized I never thanked you. What a great gesture, and I really appreciate it.' "

Lucas would go on to produce a sword-and-sorcery saga with Howard directing in 1988. "Willow to me was really like going to grad school or doing doctoral work," Howard says. "The education I received making that movie was pretty astounding."

Family connections

Many of his films are almost family reunions. He's fond of casting his family in small roles. Brother Clint (five years his junior) is instantly recognizable; his father, now 80, often turns up, too. (He's the White House photographer at the beginning of Frost/Nixon and has a larger role as a corrupt cardinal in Angels & Demons.)

His mother, Jean Speegle Howard, played Hanks' mother in Apollo 13. (She died in 2000 at age 73.) Howard's wife, novelist Cheryl Howard Crew, 54, turns up frequently, often just as an extra.

"She's in everything, going back to my Super-8 days. She's a good-luck charm. For me, it became something I was very superstitious about. Clint is not a good-luck charm. He's just a helluva character actor whom I like to work with."

He met Cheryl at Burroughs High School in Burbank, and they were married in 1975. He says his child-star status wasn't a factor for her. "She didn't love that, which is probably what I loved about her. But she seemed to like me and forgive me for the business I was in."

They have four children, Reed, Jocelyn and actresses Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village, Spider-Man 3), who gave birth to their first grandchild, a boy, last year, and Paige Howard, who is in the upcoming Sundance comedy Adventureland.

'Two guys who intersected'

Howard's other crucial relationship was with an ambitious young producer now known for his thistle-pointed hair. Grazer says he crossed paths with Howard a few times at the University of Southern California, but they didn't become friends until meeting on the Paramount Lot at a time of desperation for both of them.

"We had this meeting and were talking about movies, and we were sort of two unemployed guys," Grazer says. "He wanted to be a mainstream movie director, and I, of course, wanted to be a producer. So we were two guys who just intersected in an intangible world of hope, almost believing it could happen.

"And it did."

Their Imagine Entertainment also has produced other directors' movies (Oliver Stone's The Doors, Clint Eastwood's Changeling, Peter Berg's Friday Night Lights film) and TV shows (24, Arrested Development, Friday Night Lights).

"Our friendship works because we have different personalities, but we both humor each other," Grazer says. "He is very calm, very centered, and I really admire that. You know, and I'm the other way."

Their first movie together was 1982's Night Shift, starring Michael Keaton and Howard's Happy Days co-star Henry Winkler, who were running a call-girl ring out of the office of a city morgue. "Everybody thought of it as my first movie, but it was my fifth movie. It just happened to be my first for a studio," says Howard, whose first feature was 1977's Grand Theft Auto for B-movie producer Roger Corman.

Howard hit low points with flops such as the Matthew McConaughey reality-television spoof EDtv and Cinderella Man. But he has otherwise been one of Hollywood's most bankable directors, turning out crowd-pleasing films that also have earned the respect of critics. If there's a common thread, "I tend to make films that are about either group endeavors or families trying to struggle to cope with a crisis. Whatever the tone, that's generally at the center of it."

Some have criticized him for hopscotching among comedies, fantasies, dramas and bio-pics. Howard says his films just reflect his personality.

"I don't want to impose a style, largely because of those 20 years when I was on one TV series or another, where you're kind of required to do the same ideas and same rhythms over and over," he says. "I just made up my mind that as a filmmaker, I never wanted that to happen."

He also recently ventured into online filmmaking and created a comedy short endorsing Barack Obama for president shortly before the election. Howard sported a bad wig and played Opie and Richie in scenes with his old friends Griffith and Winkler. Obama's campaign even paid to run it as an ad during reruns of The Andy Griffith Show on TV Land, and the video spread virally online.

"I'm really pleased it was taken in the spirit in which is was given," he says. And, he says, it replaced his talking-pie routine from The Simpsons as the new cool thing his kids admire.